Why can’t I see my own Google Ads?

All the reasons your Google Ads are invisible to you alone. 

By Scott Ingram. Director, Helium Marketing.

You’re probably thinking, “Great, I’ve got a Google Ads campaign running! But where is it?”. So, you do what everyone else does and type your business name into Google, only to find your ad is nowhere to be seen… 

Before we hit the panic button, here are a few things to note about the visibility of your ads.

Budget 

First and foremost, you may not be seeing your Google Ads campaign because your business has already used up your daily budget. As a side note, clicking your own ad costs you money — this is the cost per click, or CPC — so if you do see your ad, don’t click it. 

Let’s say you have a daily budget of $100 (ie $3k per month), and your CPC is $2. After you receive 50 clicks at $2 each, you’ve used your budget for the current day. Therefore, your ads will no longer show to you — or anyone — else searching relevant terms. 

Rotation 

Google Ads is an auctioning system, meaning that you and your digital competitors are all bidding on appearing for a single Google search. Like most auctions, a single bidder is unlikely to outbid every competitor on every item. In short, you will appear for some searches, but not all searches. Google Ads will rotate you with other competitors based on who is willing to pay the most. 

Ad schedule 

Sometimes we set ads to only show at certain times using Google Ads ad schedule feature. Common settings would be to only run the ads during (or near to) the standard hours of business. We do this to ensure you only get relevant traffic. 

Let’s say you’re an accounting practice targeting professional works. We know that most professionals searching for “accountants perth” between 8:00am and 6:00pm are more likely to convert into an enquiry than someone searching at 2:30am. The 2:30am searches are more likely to be bots, international traffic, or a segment of insomnia visitors less serious about finding a new accountant for their business. This isn’t universally true, but we have a finite amount of advertising budget so we go after the traffic that has the highest chance of converting. 

Spam protection 

There are tonnes of robots and competitors out there trying to maliciously use up your advertising budget. This is to stop your ads from competing with theirs. 

A part of our service is continuously monitoring for suspicious activity by observing repeat clicks from the same IP address. When we see the same “person” (could be a bot) clicking on your ads multiple times without enquiring, we know they’re up to no good. We block them so they can’t waste any more of your budget. You’ll be surprised how much this trick alone will save you, and we often will quantify this for you so you can see the difference we’re making. 

So, if you’ve clicked on your own ad two or three times before — and you’re a Helium client — chances are we’ve blocked your IP address so you no longer see the ads. 

So, how do you know if your ads are running? 

The easiest way to see if your Google Ads are running is to login and check it out for yourself. Another even easier way is to ask your marketing provider. When our clients us ask how they’re ads are going, we send recent performance updates as well as screenshots based on the previews available in Google Ads. 

We can do the same for you, too. Start here.